Greatwall Studios Graphic Design

Checked another item off my list of chores, whoop dee do. The winter tires are off, washed, and now put back in dry storage for another five to six months. Great. I had to wait a few days because changing the tires made my back ache, and my right bicep hurt (more than I would expect). So I gave it a day to let those aches and pains subside. Then it rained, then we had track & field, then work got busy, and then we were working at the farm prepping fields with the kids. Gathering buckets of stone & rocks, plus picking up bits of metal, and pottery shards. Find all sorts of weird shit out in those fields. So now that all of this has come, and gone, I finally was in a good enough spot to take the tires away, walk the dog with the kids, and go fetch breakfast for us all since the kids only ate one slice of toast each this morning, and had room for a hot brunch meal three hours later. All good.

I have the recycling ready to go out, and our last child safety car seat is set to go in the trash. Animal in the garage has ruined it, even though I put it up in the rafters in a bag when we were done with it. Either mice, or the chipmunks have chewed it looking for nesting material. Bastards. Oh well. Off to a landfill instead of a second home.

I had high hopes of weeding our front garden bed this weekend but the weather is hardly cooperating. I like that the soil is soft and pliable but I could do without the misting drizzle, and threats of all out rain. Plus there is a lot to do, and I’m not totally feeling it right this second. I am indulging in a Lazy Sunday truth be told. There is going to be another late night Leafs Game, so that will eat up about 3 hours of this evening, and could potentially be emotionally charged. Let us hope for a game seven win. I am cautiously optimistic.

I really did a number on the tendons of my left hand on an early climb yesterday. My whole hand is lagging behind mental commands. Rather odd. I tried to play my guitar yesterday and that was a disaster. Numb, or semi functional fingers don’t make terribly good music. Had to put Voltaren to work on my forearm over night. The hand feels better today, just not one hundred percent. The body gets used to climbing twice a week, and it gets grumpy when you try to do the same things with only half of the skills maintenance, after skipping a session, and being lackadaisical about my grip strength training regimen. Bit myself in the butt. Oopsie daisy.

We have another busy week ahead of us even with tomorrow being a national holiday. My eldest daughter has six shows of Newsies to perform on Wed/Thurs, a full day of rehearsals on Tuesday, a cast party Thursday Night, and we fly at 6:15 am Friday to go visit family out west. Plus my youngest needs to build a turtle egg cage for Girl Guides on Tuesday, which means I need to pick up a bunch of stuff, and cut & prep it for construction suitable by fifteen eight year olds. There is a rumor that this particular build might get put on hold until September so that they can build more than one, and get the town to do a full presentation to the kids on why they are building them. Fingers crossed it can wait.

Had some good, challenging climbs today. I really regret missing Tuesday night because I thought the Leafs were playing. Going a whole week in between sessions can really diminish both my grip, and my overall arm/leg strength & coordination. I tried a 5.9 early on and near the top my left hand stopped responding, and my tensed fingers would not release their grip on a tight finger hold (tight as in; very narrow ledge, not a gap I was stuck in). After several heart beats and me turning to look directly at my left hand did it finally release and I was able to complete my climb. But after that early hiccup my hand wasn’t really right afterward. I failed a different 5.9 route that I have done five or six times over the last several weeks. My forearms were shot, and my left hand uncooperative. Otherwise the three of us had a gay ole time.

My oldest had her ninety minute lesson with coaching staff, and my youngest & I climbed together. Or I clipped her in, and then found a route nearby where I could get some work in, and be up, and down in time to move her on to another. I get very sweaty that way. Racing to beat her up, and down, and in & out of the clips. I do twice as many because she is so little, she is not allowed to clip in or out of any auto belay system. My tired hands get an even harder beating than usual when I climb with my kids in tow.

I’m still glad we all enjoy it though. It’s a fun little pass time for us, and it keeps me active, and off my phone, and in the moment. That is good for my kids too. They have to concentrate, and be aware, and focus on what is going on immediately around them. Plus it isn’t too far away. I’d be happier if we had one closer by, but a twenty minute drive isn’t the worst thing ever.

Looks kinda stormy outside right now. Was getting ugly on the drive home from deep inside Markham. Winds, dark low lying clouds, and a fair bit of rain. I didn’t see any lightning or hear any thunder claps. All good!

I am very glad I decided to cut the grass yesterday afternoon as last night’s rain, and today’s humidity would have made that chore particularly challenging. Not to mention how much longer it would take with a mower that bogs down under a damp, or wet grass load. It would have been aggravating to say the least. Looks like now I’ll be under a bit of pressure to cut the grass twice a week while we are in the thick of the growing season. Lots of sun, a few good dumplings of rain, and a whole lot of time equals extra work outdoors for the next several weeks.

Woke up this morning to do laundry and discovered 8 needed to empty the basement dehumidifier for the first time this season. Then noticed the water softener needed to run it’s quarterly cleaning cycle, luckily I have the appropriate detergent on hand for such a thing. I got one load of laundry out of the dryer, and a new one into the wash. Walked the dog at a wet and humid farm, and now I need to eat while I wait on some responses from work emails. Could be a busy day. It is another long weekend with Victoria Day. So that means town fireworks tonight. Score. Maybe some food trucks & icecream might be in our near future.

I have been approached to create some multimedia pieces for my daughter’s school showing of Newsies. Just waiting on a response, and some assets to work off of. It’s not typically something I do, but I’m willing to give it a whirl to help out if I can.

I felt bad for not volunteering at the track meet, but given the rain delay date was when I am away I figured it would be better to not add any additional complexity to the organisers lives. Plus it allowed me to watch freely, and come & go as I pleased to do other things throughout the day. I taped all four of my daughter’s races so that my wife could watch them and see how well our eldest daughter did. I was very proud of the effort she put forth. The wins were nice too, but I could tell she was giving it her all, and that’s what counts on and off the track. Giv’er!

You know what that means! Sun burns and dehydration. Looks to be a nice day today, not too hot, not too cold. Let us hope they all have a good day. Have fun, cheer each other on

**UPDATE: We have some early results from the women’s races this morning. My daughter placed first in the 200 m finals, and 2nd overall in the 100 m sprint finals. A very happy, and exhausted girl!

Later on today she will try her best at standing long jump, running long jump, and what I would call shot put, but they have reclassified as “ball throw” due to previous injuries having small kids use an actual shot put.

I had to run home to check on the puppy, and to eat/drink myself. It’s been a lovely day, warm but not hot, and overcast so there wasn’t altogether too much sun. It appears to be warming up, and getting brighter out. I’ll bring a fresh cold drink to my daughter when I go back in two hours time. She is pleased as punch. I got it all in video too! Nice.

Only a day or so ago the Lilacs looked miles away from flowering, and today BAM! Purple flowers at the ready. In another day or two those should be fully formed, and very aromatic. I wonder if that means we will get some Jasmine and Russian Olive scents in the coming weeks too. The Russian Olive is a horrific barbed, spiked nuisance of a tree, but by the gods do they ever smell good, at least to me. When I spent my summers cutting grass in Brampton, and Mississauga, you’d find them everywhere, and they’d stick you really badly in the eyes, face, shoulder, neck, whatever you failed to secure when around them, but it smells so good. Kinda sick. Ha.

Unfortunately the Lilacs at our house never last long enough for my wife or youngest daughter to enjoy them on their birthdays. They come, and go so fast on our property. Other places we see them for weeks after ours have dried, and crumpled to dust. Maybe the other houses have irrigation and a regular watering schedule? I don’t know. Besides cutting the grass, and watering the Dahlias we plant every spring I don’t much bother with our lawn or vegetation. I’m not altogether bothered by weeds in the grass, and I don’t see the point in dependent trees or shrubs that have to be watered, but can’t survive on their own. I’m not opposed to watering once or twice over the course of the whole summer. I don’t want to see the trees suffer when it gets really dry in late July, and into August. A good drink from the hose isn’t unwarranted during that time, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to water every single item multiple times a week whether we have rain or we don’t. That’s ludicrous.

The apple trees, and the Cherry tree all look lovely right now too, with their fresh blooms blowing around in the breeze. I don’t get any sort of scent off of those, but they certainly do look great. Of course the puppy chewed all of my raspberry stalks so who knows if we will even get any berries this year. Fucking mutt chewed through half of my grape vine too. Little shit head. I had to pull meters and meters of severed, newly budding vine out of the fence line because he has nibbled through the main vine body. That’s cost me about twelve kilograms worth of grapes if not more. I’d wager he has stomped all of my strawberries to death too. Cute puppy, but he is a menace to our backyard. Chewed trees, vines, hedges, and he walks all over the berry patches, and digs huge holes against the side of the house. Dick head.

It’s warm out so my neighbour is once again going to spend ever waking moment he isn’t fire fighting, running a tile saw, or cutting bricks, or manning a jack hammer, concrete drill, or planing table tops from sun up to sun down. It’s awesome. Can’t enjoy the breezes without deafening noise too. Brick dust coats just about everything in a 25 m radius. Can’t wait for them to finish remodeling so I don’t have to hear this shit any more.

Sounds like I’m in a sour mood. I’m not. Not really. Just sounding off on some current challenges we’ve come up against with the dog, kids, mother nature etc… I’m generally quite pleasant, I think. Ha.

Put my garage to good use yesterday, and Sunday by opting to swap out my own sets of winter/summer tires. My wife’s GMC is by far the easier of the two vehicles to switch tires on. I have them all labelled so I know where I got them from, and where to rotate them to. Her tires are unidirectional so I have to follow the arrows in order to obtain all of the benefits from their design. The new vans tires are omnidirectional, and had no labels from the dealership, so I put them where I felt like it. No arrows, triangles, or wear patterns present to denote an orientation specific to best performance. I looked it up.

The nice thing about my wife’s car is that it has a long rail from wheel well to wheel well where 8 can place my jack. The new van only has four six inch wide spots available to put your jack. The rail is deep, and angled too. I had to switch over to my bottle jack, as my floor jack is too wide at the lift point, and the 2×4, or 2×4 I use to distribute the weight over a broader area isn’t deep enough to touch the interior of the rail and contact the jack, which deforms the body panels. But my bottle jack works just fine for that vehicle. It’s just annoying to have to switch between the two types of jack. I’d love to see how a shop would lift this type of vehicle with such a limited lift area to use. Must have a small/tall adapter of some sort. Like a hockey puck stack or urethane block to go up into the space. Seems needlessly limiting in my opinion.

The locking lug nut wasn’t too bad to work with. Seems our new van lugs are the same size as the old van, so I didn’t need to bring all my sockets out to test them to find the correct size. That was a relief at least. Which means I knew I had the correct size for both my breaker bar, torque wrench, and impact wrench sockets. Nice!

But I did do a number on my shoulder and my back, to one side anyway. Voltaren to the rescue. I took the time to power wash all of the tires, the new summer ones, and the winter ones as well. I’m just going to wait another day or two before I move them to let my back rest a bit. Tires on rims get heavy. For a lump of a man like myself, whom isn’t used to slinging weights like that around, I get pretty sore afterwards. Lifting tires with one arm to locate a stud and swing the tires into place required an awful lot of bending, twisting, and patience in yesterday’s early afternoon sun. I was sweating like a pig. I had thought about using my crowbar to help me lift the tire into place but I would get very angry if I poked a hole in brand new, never used summer tires trying to wrangle the damn things into the van.

No matter, I managed to get them all on, and torqued down to the correct spec’s per vehicle. 140 ft lbs for the GMC, and a mere 104 ft lbs for the van. Weirdly specific I think. But I’m no engineer.

Hopefully tomorrow I will be less achy and I can run the tires down to  storage for the summer months. I will see them again in late October or early November, weather depending.

In total my wife got a whooping six hours of peaceful time to herself on Mother’s Day, if you don’t count the presence of our dog. We spent five hours or so at Canada’s Wonderland enjoying the beautiful weather, including the drive there and back, and finding a parking spot and you get roughly six hours of uninterrupted alone time to read, watch a movie, eat a warm meal unbothered by anyone. Glorious.

Turns out my youngest is a mere hairs breadth from being able to start riding some of the giga coasters in the park. I’m excited, she is petrified. My eldest and I took a moment to ride Yukon Striker, so at least we got one big ride in yesterday. We tackled many of the smaller rides, and introductory coasters at my youngest’s request. If she’s not ready to go massive, I’m not going to force it. I would like them all to enjoy the park freely, not have it forced upon them.

It was sunny and warm when our of the path of the breezes, and almost chilly when exposed to unfettered wind. My face got a little rosy from the sun, but I didn’t burn. Thank the gods for the February base coat we earned in the Florida Keys. I think that ore-exposure saved us from getting actual burns yesterday.

After all that walking I came home and swapped out my wife’s tires. Winters were washed, and ready to be put away in storage until November. Now I have the van tires to either do myself, or pay a professional to do. I guess it depends on how busy I get this week. I at least have the tires on hand, so I’m agile, nimble, able to do whatever. Cool.

Welp, it’s Monday. Best be about my business. Ciao Bella!

Get the kids out of the house for a few hours of peace for mum. Feed them, entertain them, but most of all keep them from climbing on mum, and asking for drinks & snacks once she sits down. Ha. Kids. Gotta love’em!

Happy Mother’s Day to all whom fill the role. Take it easy on the mimosas and steer clear of the thirty dollar egg breakfasts today. Cheers!

One particular issue that my garage shop has is power, or the lack thereof. So once we did some remodeling upstairs I paid an electrician to add a new small sub panel to the garage, in hopes I could land several 115v outlets, and hopefully at least one 240v. I got four 115v outlets and a 220v. Not bad, but it meant my dreams of welding at home were lowered a fair bit. Had to find a small unit that could run 115v, instead of a regular sized unit on a 240v. But, concurrent to this lack of outlets, is the fact that they are all located on one side of the garage, and clustered together. So unless I wanted to stack machines on top of each other and forever more be moving tools around on wheelie carts, I did the second best thing I know of and draped extension cords all over the show. It was unsightly, and most likely not very safe. It’s a short term fix for a long term problem.

But now that I have cleaned, and cleaned, and cleaned up the shop. Moved tools all around, and eliminated a lot of the space wasting items I finally decided to clean up the cords. Now I cannot eliminate them entirely, I did however consolidate them down, and managed to unplug, and recapture five cords. I think that’s pretty great. It now means I have open outlets once again, so I can put a tool directly into the wall socket (if that works) and not rely almost entirely on chains of cords strung together. I feel safer. It looks better. And my stock pile of usable cords has grown considerably.

So that was what I did to occupy myself after rock climbing, and throwing a ball around in the street with my oldest daughter today.

While the OT winning goal wasn’t ours, that was a very entertaining game three to watch. I like that level of intensity. It was a real nail biter right up until the buzzer sounded. Whoo wee that was nearly 80 minutes of electric play. Serve it directly into my veins! Would have loved to be up 3 – 0 in round two against Florida, but I think it is still achievable to win this series. Fingers, arms, legs, and toes crossed. Hell I’ll cross my eyes too if it means an entry into round three of the Stanley cup play offs.

I have rock climbing earlier than usual this session of Saturdays, so I’ll need to make sure I cut the grass on Fridays or Sundays because we won’t get home until the full heat of the day is Upon us. High UV days can really land you in some trouble around here. My base tan is pretty faded from February in the Keys. No desire to get badly burned ever again. It’s not all that warm here but the UV index is really high, so odds are I wouldn’t even have any sun screen on, or an SPF shirt to protect my arms and neck. Just straight star radiation to the exposed skin for a hot coal glow all evening, and night sweats to go along with it . No thanks.

The gym is starting to get really hot inside, so I should probably find suitable shorts that I can wear so I don’t immediately sweat through my clothes once I walk through the door. It also has that stale sweat stink most gyms suffer from which I’m not very keen on. Yuck. Smells like unwashed ore teen kids coming out of gym class to sit in front of you for the whole rest of the day in junior high. Ugh! Horrendous.

Anyway, it is officially Saturday, and it should be around 19°C today. Perhaps I will tackle some outdoor chores today since last week it was so cool outside. We could ride our bikes, or take a spin on our skateboards. That might be fun! Now that the weather is turning we can be outdoors more often. Throw a ball around and play catch. Kick a soccer ball. Take the sparring pass outside and really give them shit in preparation for next month’s tournament. That just might be the ticket!